Condolences and Appreciation from XEmacs

To Ian's family and the Debian community,

The XEmacs developers, testers, and user community offer our
condolences on the passing of Ian Murdock.  His spirit and leadership
will be missed especially in the Debian Project, of course, but his
contributions to the ideology of free software, to theory and practice
of community building in software development, and to the practical
management of distributions will live on as a fitting memorial to the
man.

Though I don't know of any of the XEmacs core developers who
interacted with Ian personally, XEmacs as a project owes much to Linux
distributions, and the many distributions in turn owe much to Debian,
which now has some very famous "children" (eg, Ubuntu) and even
"grandchildren" (Mint) among the popular distributions.  Surely this
is a testament to the great ideas of the founders of the Debian
distribution, and especially Ian himself.  A large share of the
development of XEmacs (and later, our sister project SXEmacs) takes
place on Linux-based systems, and I am sure I'm not the only one who
uses Debian.  Certainly developers and users are Ubuntu-based, and
thus owe much of the development of their systems to the volunteers of
Debian.  And even those XEmacs developers whose primary interest was
our Windows port would often use Linux as well to develop "generic
code" that they found useful, though I don't know if any used Debian
or derived distributions.

I myself started with Slackware and BOGUS Linux in late 1994, but soon
moved to Debian GNU/Linux.  My first presentation to the Tokyo Linux
Users Group in 1996 or 1997 was on the advantages of the Debian
dependency resolution system in a point/counterpoint presentation with
an RPM advocate.  My mail and web hosts (including tracker.xemacs.org,
which I host and admin) have run Debian ever since.  Though I have
experimented with other distributions, one reason I was comfortable
doing that was the knowledge that Debian would always be available for
"production" hosts and as a competent alternative in any application.

Though its software distribution has been the basis for development
platforms, user environments, and business, of course Debian is much
more than a bag of bytes.  Ian's vision of a community-developed
distribution has borne much fruit.  It's not the only way to develop
free software, and Debian was not the only pioneer, but Debian's
decentralized but democratic governance has been a model for many
projects, and I daresay it has influenced the conduct of all free and
open source software projects, including those that happen to be
managed by business firms.  It certainly has informed my own activity
as an XEmacs Review Board member.  The Debian Free Software Guidelines
are as important a reference for advocates of free and open source
software as the definitions published by the FSF and the OSI.  While
distribution management is now a component of many languages as well
as operating systems, Debian has been a leader and model in both
theory and practice of distributing complex component systems for over
two decades.

XEmacs, like many free software projects, owes much to the
availability of free operating systems like Debian. Even those of us
who did not or do not use Debian directly are in debt for Debian's
contributions to distribution development (even one of the earliest
free software distributions for the Macintosh platform was based on
dpkg), and for the many contributions of Debian and Debian-based
developers to the libraries and operating environments we depend on
both as developers and users.

Software distributions are often likened to living things, and
certainly the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is among the most vibrant
and vivacious of distros.  I pray for the consolation of Ian's family
and friends, knowing that his ideas and his work live on in the
distribution he founded.

Thank you, Ian!  Long live Debian!

for the XEmacs Review Board and the community of XEmacs developers and users

Stephen J. Turnbull
Tsukuba, Japan
January 16, 2016